Modern database systems provide processes for generating database backups and for using such backups to recover from database crashes. These backups may also be used to copy a database to a second database system. More specifically, the backups generated by a first database system are used to perform a database recovery operation on the second database system. As a result, the second database system is a copy of the first database system at the time of the backup generation. The foregoing operation is unavailable if the number of hosts within the first database system is different from the number of hosts within the second database system.